In vitro culturing of cells provides material necessary for cell biology research, and provides much of the basis for advances in the fields of pharmacology, physiology and toxicology. However, isolated cultured eukaryotic cells living in an incubator in a culture vessel bathed in cell culture media often have very different characteristics compared to individual cells in vivo. Information obtained from experiments conducted on primary and secondary cultures of eukaryotic cells is informative to pharmacologists, physiologists and toxicologists only to the extent that cultured cells have the same characteristics as intact cells.
Eukaryotic cells can grow on surfaces of cell culture vessels. For example, cells in liquid media can be introduced into a cell culture vessel such as a cell culture flask or a multi-well cell culture plate, the cell culture vessel placed into a suitable environment such as an incubator, and the cells allowed to settle onto a surface of the cell culture vessel where they attach, grow, and divide. However, some cells perform better than others when growing on a flat surface. Some cells require different surfaces in order to maintain a more natural phenotype, and to provide optimal in vitro data.